Ecologies of Education: Covid Pandemic as an Occasion to Interrogate Adult Education Theoretical Frameworks

The global pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus and the measures taken to face it have upset the organization of individual and collective existence, with respect to time, spaces, relationships and habits that marked our daily life. The health emergency has soon become an economic, social, political, cultural, educational emergency, which forced to radically redefine the structure of whole society, the ways of taking care of people and using services, as well as our previous habits related to moving, socializing, communicating, producing, purchasing and consuming tangible and intangible goods and, not least, educating and teaching. Therefore, schools and educational services are in the middle of a sudden change that has affected both education professionals (educators, teachers) and pupils. The emergency has accentuated the already existing inequalities and created new forms of educational poverty, discrimination and social exclusion. A strong investment of resources has thus become essential in the educational world to re-invent professional practices and to foster the adoption of strategies designed for promoting inclusion and reducing the negative effects of the current crisis. In addition to social or pedagogical themes linked to specific educational projects and services, the relevant changes occurred during the pandemic raise relevant epistemological questions that interrogate the theoretical frameworks of educational research and the conceptual categories that are adopted in it. In fact, the pandemic situation has shown that it is necessary to orient educational and social reflection to the links existing between spheres of existence usually considered as separate: nature-culture, society-technical, human-non human, etc. It is therefore necessary to change the reference paradigm in order to grasp the transformations that are taking place, otherwise not visible. This paper is aimed at introducing a reflection about the status of the “human” and his/her relationships with “non-human” alongside the domain of pedagogical knowledge and the adult educational field. A body of knowledge and a field of practices that have been always characterized by a human-centered perspective rooted in anthropocentric assumptions on the relationship among humans, nature and other living beings. This dualistic vision, opposing human and non-human, nature and culture, meaning and matter, is becoming more and more unbearable in connection with dramatic ecological changes we are witnessing. The reference to adult education is significant, because the tenets of dualist and anthropocentric thought appear more deeply rooted in adult subjects. This means renewing research and educational practices in adult education in order to critically deconstruct the anthropological concepts underlying the current educational models internalized by adults. In this scenario, then, who is the “human” in the field of adult education? Our proposal is to reassemble the human with the environment through a perspective we termed “Ecologies of Education”, an inclusive theoretical vision of education aimed at grasping the multiple interactions involving people, technologies, objects, spaces, animals, living beings embedded in a world characterized by intense and unprecedented contaminations between different bodies, domains of knowledge, theories, fields, imaginaries and experiences. In our presentation we will focus on specific assumptions underlying our exploration of educational themes and issues through an ecological perspective, able to understand and analyze educational phenomena as situated, complex, processual and relational events, assuming contingent and dynamic forms, deeply connected to the environmental, technological, social, cultural and natural transformations of the contemporary world.